“I’ve heard that too,” Galileo growled. “People have been writing to ask me about it, even from Florence.”
Cartophilus nodded as he stared at the floor. “Maybe you might want to get whatever warning it really is from Bellarmino himself, in writing and signed by him, so that you have it specifically spelled out and in a document you can show people later. In case there is ever a question about it.”
“Yes.” Galileo glared at him; he did not like the old one interfering like this, in ways that made him think about what Cartophilus represented. “Good idea,” he said heavily.
“It’s nothing, maestro.”
Galileo began the process of securing another audience with Bellarmino. This had to be done through Guicciardini, so it took per sistence and a bit of begging. While Galileo went through that distasteful process, he spent every evening out at banquets, but now he no longer made virtuoso recitals in defense of the Copernican view, being merely convivial instead. Naturally people noticed this change, and rumors about how severely he had been warned off by the Lord Cardinal proliferated.
Galileo ignored all that and soldiered on. He discovered that Rome had many more than seven hills. It became more and more difficult to clean his jacket without revealing how old and shabby it was. Every night he ate too much and drank too much wine. Even on the rare night that he stayed home at the Villa Medici, he could not calm himself without copious amounts of wine, and he almost always partied late with Annibale Primi on the hilltop, drinking to distract himself in the very face of the huge city and the power it wielded over everyone. On more than one such hopeless night we had to load him into a wheelbarrow and trundle him down the hill to his bed, dumping him onto it like a load of bricks, him all the while snarling and snoring and muttering about bad things sure to happen.
We went to work with Sarpi’s Roman network, wandering the back alleys in the low foul warrens near the Tiber, knocking on doors or meeting people in taverns and the backs of little churches. Rome had been drawing strange people to it for centuries, and their offspring were even stranger and more hand-to-mouth than they had been when they came. We talked to gatekeepers, servants, foreign diplomats’ aides, secretaries, lawyers, cooks, clerks. Some had secrets to sell, or knew of others who did. We paid certain publicans, go-betweens, a poor noble, a defrocked priest, several madams and prostitutes; we hired a few observant old street dwellers to keep an ear to certain doorways, and even employed a roof-crawling professional eavesdropper, a man smaller even than Bellarmino, who was willing to try to make his way to within hearing distance of certain rooms in the Vatican. One contact led to another in this vast net of humanity on the sly, servants and beggars leading us deeper and deeper into the parisitical tangle of the clerical bureaucracy. Rome was an infinite maze at this level, a warren of alleys and dirt-floored piazzas where one passed arcade after arcade with their shops open to the world, where the smells filling the air changed abruptly from baking bread to tanning leather to rotten meat to the stink of the urinals. It was hard to sort out the true from the false, or the useful from the harmful; this was where a big network like the Venetians’ could validate findings, and hope to confirm or invalidate them. Almost certainly they had a better sense of the whole situation than any other group in Rome, even the factions inside the Vatican; but it nevertheless remained a stubbornly murky thing. Forces were swirling.
Buonamici appeared at the gate one day, and when Cartophilus got free they went down to the little church where Sarpi was hiding, and sat in the cool of the shade among the chickens. Some of the street tykes were having a water fight, squirting it at each other through reeds they had found.
The spymaster flicked seed shells at the skinny birds as he told the men part of what he had learned. “A few weeks ago young Cardinal Orsini made an appeal on Galileo’s behalf directly to Pope Paul. He explained Galileo’s view of things, and declared there was no contradiction between that view and Scripture, but the pope told him Galileo should give up his views. When Orsini tried to continue, Paul cut him off by saying the matter was being looked into.”
“That was Bellarmino,” Buonamici said.
“Yes. Paul called him in and instructed him to convoke a special congregation of the Holy Office, who were to be explicitly tasked to identify Galileo’s opinion as erroneous and heretical. This congregation gathered just a few days later—six Dominicans, a Jesuit, and an Irish priest. They reported to the pope that the idea that the sun was the center of the universe was ‘foolish and absurd.’ Stultam et absurdam. Also formally heretical. The idea that the Earth moved was ‘erroneous in faith’ and ‘contradicted the sense of Holy Scripture.’”
Cartophilus put his head between his knees, feeling sick to his stomach. Even Buonamici, the coolest of men, was looking a bit pale. “Formally heretical. That’s new, yes?” he said.
“Yes,” Sarpi said dryly. “And so it was that Galileo was called into Bellarmino, so that the lord cardinal could order him to abandon the Copernican view. If he refused to do it, he was to be sent to Segizzi, who would order him formally to abjure his positions. If he refused that order, he was to be incarcerated until he agreed to obey it.”
“So Segizzi jumped the sequence.”
“Yes.”
“All of this,” Cartophilus pointed out gloomily, “was caused by Galileo coming to Rome to argue his case. If he had not come, all this would not have happened.”
Sarpi shrugged, staring at Cartophilus curiously. “But that isn’t what happened. So we have to deal with this, now.”
“Yes, Father.”
“It’s also apparently the case that Segizzi has put a document in Galileo’s file that states his warning was comprehensive. Now it’s in the hands of the clerks, and back in the boxes and shelves of the innermost offices. Out of reach of anyone who might want to change it.”
There was silence for a while, and the low cackle and hum of the city wafted into the church and over them. The tykes were shrieking.
“We still have some angles of attack available,” Sarpi reassured them. “Galileo needs to talk to Bellarmino again, because Bellarmino is angry, and that could be a big help. And I’m going to see if I can get our man an audience with Paul again. Of course I will have to use an intermediary; I can’t ask him directly!” His laughing face was both ugly and beautiful.
At first after the interview with Bellarmino, Galileo had told everyone about it, getting angrier every time. His friends in the city came by and tried to calm him down, but he became even more enraged when they did, and shouted so loudly that anyone on the Pincian Hill could hear him. Cesi came by, then Antonio Orsini, then Castelli, but he only got angrier.
Guicciardini dictated letters home to Picchena and Cosimo that could be heard during their composition, or read by anyone who cared to slip into his offices at night and dig into the courier’s bags. One at this time said,
Galileo has relied more on his own counsel than on that of his friends. Cardinal del Monte and myself, and also several Cardinals from the Holy Office, tried to persuade him to be quiet and not to go on irritating the issue. If he wanted to hold this Copernican opinion, he was told, let him hold it quietly and not spend so much effort in trying to make others share it. Everyone feared that his coming here might be prejudicial and dangerous and that, instead of justifying himself and triumphing over his enemies, he could end up with an affront. Now this has happened, but he only gets more hotly excited about these views of his, and he has an extremely passionate temper, with little patience and prudence to keep it in control. It is this irritability that makes the skies of Rome very dangerous for him. He is passionately involved in this quarrel, as if it were his own business, and he does not see what it could lead to, so that he will get himself into danger, together with anyone who seconds him. For he is vehement and is all fixed and impassioned, so that it is impossible, if you have him around, to escape from his hand. And this is a business which is not a joke but may become of great consequence.